


Sinew and Starlight

by HazelBeka



Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon verse, Discord: Umino Hours, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, M/M, Mythology - Freeform, Trans Iruka, Werewolf Iruka, dealing with your gender dysphoria by becoming a werewolf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-08
Updated: 2020-04-08
Packaged: 2021-03-01 21:47:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23544118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HazelBeka/pseuds/HazelBeka
Summary: Iruka has always longed for transformation.
Relationships: Hatake Kakashi/Umino Iruka, Umino Iruka & Uzumaki Naruto
Comments: 20
Kudos: 109
Collections: The Umino Hours Quarantine Boredom Buster





	Sinew and Starlight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MagnusTesla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagnusTesla/gifts).



**I.**

Iruka has always longed for transformation. He has never quite been who he wants to be. When he was a child, he played games of make believe, and his mother sewed him costumes so he could change himself each week: into princess, ANBU, hokage, doctor, faerie. Nothing was beyond him in those days when imagination could still blur the edges of reality.

His teenage years had been one long howl of yearning. He did transform, but not into the things he wanted. On one long, fiery night he became an orphan. More slowly, insidiously, his body betrayed him. He’d never spared it more than a passing thought until his breasts began to bud and then to bloom, and he realised suddenly that something had gone wrong. His body and his mind were different shapes, like two puzzle pieces of the stars at night but in different constellations. They’d been jammed together by mistake and now could not be pulled apart, forever misaligned.

Becoming who he is today has been a long and tiring process. At first he looked back to his childhood, to those days of dress up, and he thought that was all he had to do. To cut his hair, to bind his chest, to wear the right clothes. But there had been some magic in his mother’s handmade outfits that was missing now. He studied wards and barriers, and he got good at them, but he could never learn to keep reality out. Sometimes, when he tried to play pretend, he could convince himself, but his body would remind him. It punished him with tender breasts, with roaring pains and bloodletting.

Menstruation is a transformation of sorts. Every twenty-eight days like clockwork his body shifts violently, painfully, into a different shape. The self he has built for those four weeks is twisted into something he is not. There is no avoiding it. No charms or rituals, no prayers or holy relics. The curse cannot be broken.

But even a cursed life must still go on. He cannot change his body but he can still act the part. He lives his life like an actor in a play. Sometimes other people play along, sometimes they can’t look past the cardboard props and painted background. But slowly he gathers a few precious people who accept both the actor and the part because they see the beauty in theatre. Of those precious people there are two he truly cherishes.

In part he’s drawn to Naruto because they are reflections of each other. The kyuubi is a monster trapped inside a boy, and Iruka is a boy trapped inside a monstrous body. They find family in each other, and when they’re together the world seems kinder. Naruto sees in Iruka only what he is: a ready smile, a harried teacher, an open door with a home inside. And Iruka sees a boy who is starving for warmth and love and light, and yet carries all these things inside himself. Naruto is easy to love, and Iruka discovers that he, too, is easy to love.

Kakashi is a man who hides his face and owns only one of his eyes. They become friends slowly, and then, more. Kakashi is only attracted to men, but he doesn’t recoil from Iruka’s body the first time they sleep together, or any of the times after that. At first, Iruka thinks they are both caught up in this game of make believe, but then Kakashi says something that makes him think again.

But you’re not pretending, Kakashi says after Iruka voices his thoughts out loud. You’re not playing dress up, Iruka. You’re just building yourself with the tools you have, like the rest of us.

Kakashi doesn’t know what it’s like to be stuck in a body that doesn’t match his soul, but he knows what it’s like to see himself through the eyes of an audience. The world stares at both of them, and in their own ways they hide, and in their own ways they stare back.

In an ideal world, it would be enough to know that Kakashi and Naruto accept him as he is. But it isn’t enough. Their love cannot change the way he feels about his body. Their love cannot transform him and yet he cannot bear to stay the same.

But there is a third option.

**II.**

When Iruka was a child, his mother would make him costumes but his father would read him stories. Sometimes they were stories of men and women, but sometimes they were stories of the Other. Women who were fish beneath the waist, men with the legs of goats, and seals who could peel off their skins to reveal soft, human flesh beneath. These were the stories that stole into his dreams and offered him a thousand different bodies he could wear.

It’s hard, in this world, to know which stories are only fictions and which contain a grain of truth. He’s heard sailors swear they’ve seen birds with women’s head and giant serpents roiling in the depths. Sometimes shinobi return from missions with a strange look in their eyes, and they tell him about the voices they’ve heard in the forest, the shadows that slipped from tree to tree and stalked them through the night.

At first, Iruka listened to these tales only when they came his way. Then he started to seek them out. He befriended the retired shinobi, the ones who’d travelled widely and brought superstitions home. They would tell him how to keep the Other from the door: iron horseshoes, eye-shaped pendants, twisting symbols carved into the gate.

Iruka listened patiently, and then he asked, But how do I invite them in?

This question brings him to tonight. He leaves the safety of the village walls before sunset, alone, and makes his way into the woods. He starts his search in the thick, golden light of the day’s end, but soon the long shadows melt into dusk, and the night comes quickly. No one knows where he is tonight. Not even Kakashi. Iruka didn’t trust him not to try and talk him out of this, but Iruka knows what he wants and what he has to do to get it.

When the moon rises, it is large and full and bright. Iruka waits until its light spills down through the branches and pools between the shadows of the forest floor. It doesn’t illuminate much, but it’s enough to see by. He finds his way to a murmuring stream and watches it sparkle in the moonbeams, black water fringed with stars. There’s a quiet splash and he thinks he sees a small, dark shape vanish downstream, but he can’t be sure. A bat flickers past on silent wings, and an owl hoots mournfully above.

Something moves on the other side of the stream, and Iruka catches his breath. Across the water, emerging from the trees, is a wolf. Its fur is silver in the moonlight, and its eyes an ancient amber. It comes right up to the water’s edge and stands there like a proud god, staring back. When Iruka doesn’t move, barely breathes, the wolf lowers its head to the stream and drinks.

Iruka has the crazy urge to speak to it. He wants to tell this wolf what he plans to do tonight. He wants to tell it why. But even if the wolf could understand his words, it wouldn’t understand his meaning. What do wolves know of human customs, human feelings? Iruka’s problems mean nothing here, and he finds that thought refreshing. In fact, he’s counting on it. Because the wolf is what he’s come out here to find.

When the wolf has drunk its fill, it turns and slinks back into the shadows of the forest, not sparing him another glance. Iruka watches it go. He waits until he’s sure it’s gone and isn’t coming back, and then he crosses the stream, balancing on chakra-tingling feet and hopping quickly so he won’t stumble in the current.

On the bank, he crouches, squints at the ground by moonlight. There, in the bare earth where the wolf was standing, is a perfect pawprint. Iruka’s chest flutters with excitement, and he cups his hands, dips them into the stream and carefully trickles the water through his fingers into the paw-shaped hole. It takes a few tries to fill it, and the earth starts to absorb it instantly. He has to be quick.

Iruka looks up at the moon, says a prayer to any god who might be listening, and then lowers his mouth to the pawprint and drinks.

**III.**

Iruka has always longed for transformation.

It hadn’t happened that night in the woods. He’d felt something – a quickening in his veins, an itch on the underside of his skin – but nothing more. That’s all right though. He’s waited twenty-three years for this, and he can wait a little longer.

He has to wait another twenty-eight-day cycle, tracking the phases of the moon and of his body. There’s an ache in his jaw that comes and goes, a restlessness in his limbs at night, and as the moon grows fat and ripe among the clouds, he dreams of scents he sees in fizzing colours. Naruto is a fresh lemon yellow, Kakashi smoky violet, and himself a forest green. On the day before the full moon, he can see their colours by daylight if he breathes in deep.

Kakashi notices his impatience as the nights grow brighter. He asks more than once what the matter is, but Iruka doesn’t tell him. He will if everything goes well but this time, the first time, he wants to experience the change alone.

They end up in bed together that day, a warm June evening, the window open to let a breeze caress their bare skin as they move together. Iruka’s blood is singing and his heart is full. He slips out through the village gates into the twilight with Kakashi’s scent still on his skin and a smile on his kiss-swollen lips.

As the sun goes down, he walks deep into the woods and takes off his clothes. Nakedness is something he usually avoids, but tonight his body feels different. It’s becoming part of the forest already, although the change has not yet begun. The human gaze is stripped away here; only the eyes of the forest see him now: the nightjars, the chirping cicadas, the thousand chittering, snuffling creatures that don’t care what he is or isn’t. They know him only as part of the landscape and will forget him the moment he’s gone.

When the moon rises, his blood howls, and Iruka’s body _changes_. It’s painful, a deep cramping ache in his muscles, a grinding of bones, and a shifting of balance that topples him onto his hands and knees. This shape he becomes is like nothing he has ever known, divorced so thoroughly from everything he’s wanted and hated alike that for the first time since his childhood Iruka simply _is_. 

He is not a body, not something that can be gendered with a look. He is only sinew and starlight, senses and self. The world has changed around him, become a layered symphony of scents and sounds, as though it has opened itself to him, welcomed him. He isn’t human now. He is something entirely Other, has always been Other, but so is the rest of the world. Every non-human thing, every slow-blooming flower, every chrysalis, every creature that has never longed to be human. Now Iruka, too, is one of them. Finally, he belongs. Realises he has always belonged out here beyond humanity’s narrow gaze.

In the distance, he hears a howl and pricks up his ears. Wonders briefly if it’s the wolf who has unknowingly given him this gift, and then throws back his head and howls a reply. This is connection without language, and he knows what to do without needing word-shaped thoughts. His body responds to his feelings without having to parse them through a fear of consequences, without caring how other people will react. None of that matters now. He simply feels that he wants company, and then he’s slipping through the trees, towards another howl that beckons him like a beacon. Rejection no longer holds meaning for him. For these hours of moonlight, it doesn’t exist. 

He can’t stay this way forever. The dawn will force him back up on two legs, but his human form can never take this away from him. For as long as the moon grows full at night, he will have this, and even for the rest of the month he will know he’s a wolf on the inside.

Iruka lopes away through the woods and his body feels like home.

**Author's Note:**

> This is another prompt fill from the Umino Hours discord server, which is run by the wonderful Magnus <3 I spliced together two completely unrelated prompts - werewolf Iruka and trans Iruka, and I hope the result is to your liking.
> 
> Thanks to BooleanWildcard for beta-ing <3 If you liked this story and fancy some more trans Iruka with a mythological slant (of the more classical variety) you should definitely check out their fic [With the Tides](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22538137), which is absolutely fantastic.


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